Western Digital buffs up in Longmont

Company adding square footage and jobs to Longmont site

By Tony Kindelspire Longmont Times-Call

Posted:
07/19/2013 06:28:18 PM MDT

Updated:
07/19/2013 06:29:27 PM MDT

Mark Thompson of Longmont, a systems failure analysis engineer, test drives equipment in the test process chamber before it is sent off to a user at Western Digital on South Fordham Street on Friday in Longmont. Western Digital is expanding its physical space by 30 percent in addition to adding 18 jobs. Its employees make around $90,000 per year.
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Kai Casey
)

LONGMONT -- Data storage drive-maker Western Digital is increasing its physical footprint by about a third and will be adding at least 18 new engineering jobs to its facility in Longmont, which will push it over the 200-employee mark locally.

The company has announced it is adding an additional 18,000 square feet to its existing 43,000, bringing the facility at 1951 S. Fordham St. to 61,000 square feet, an increase of 30 percent.

The company said it also anticipates adding 18 employees probably within the next three months, and it is not ruling out also transferring employees into Longmont from some of its other facilities, according to Harold Teague, vice president of the Longmont Design Center.

Spencer Krist of Boulder, a drive program manager in the FIT-U Program, checks drives at Western Digital on South Fordham Street on Friday in Longmont.
(
Kai Casey
)

He said the increase in demand for the company's data center products, particularly as more data centers shift to so-called "cloud" storage, is driving the growth locally.

"It's escalated the importance of the Longmont Design Center beyond even what we originally thought," said Teague, who, in a different role with the company, helped pick Longmont as the spot to open a new design center in 2007.

"The Longmont Design Center is the primary talent pool in the company for delivering the silicon (chips), which supports all of our products, but especially our data center products," he said.

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He said unlike some companies, Western Digital's design centers -- such as the one here, and in its hometown of Irvine, Calif. and in San Jose, Calif. -- are not product-specific, but instead serve a certain function that is valuable to a variety of the company's products. The silicon chips designed in Longmont, Teague said, are "the heart" of the company's storage devices.

"It's the master of what goes on in the drive, and everything else in that drive it controls," Teague said.

He said that the additional space would have a combination of uses, but expanding the new product testing area is one critical need. The extra space also will allow room to keep adding employees as the need arises, he said.

"We are very flexible on where we put people and we view Longmont and the surrounding area as a tremendous talent pool," Teague said. "That's why we located there in the first place."